May 6th, 2011

~Friday~ I enjoyed beautiful weather at the city bus stop this morning, arriving there at 8:13 and boarding the bus at 8:26. Hot Mess Driver was running late this morning, but at least she had the oven turned off.

A lady sitting across from me was wearing what looked like a nurse's smock, although it had huge clip-art diamonds all over it with the phrase "Girl's Best Friend" in between all of the diamonds. That pattern made her look more like a gambling-loving floozy or a loose-lady on the lookout for a sugar daddy more than anything else. Bless her heart.

It did, however, make me think about the stark difference between girl's best friend and man's best friend, which I hadn't really ever thought of before. It also made me wonder if the man in "man's best friend" means a man or everyman, which of course would include women. Inquiring minds want to know.

Logorrhea boarded at her usual stop and started talking the second she sat down to the poor sucker sitting next to her. Indicating the direction from which she walked to the bus, she said, "You see what they doin' up where I stay?"

Then, to a man sitting beside her who was looking at a telephone case she had clipped to her belt, "You like camouflage? It was my husband's. He's a Marine, and he only wore it once. He went up under a house—he's a plumber—with it on and when he came out, it had pulled off."

She droned on fingering it, "I don't go up under houses. Where I work, we have to leave all our stuff in a locker."

The next part of the conversation seemed to be about the guy she was talking to trying to figure out her current marital status. I think he took her statement, "It was my husband's," to mean it was her husband's when he was her husband. But in the end, she'd meant it was her husband's before it was hers."

She ended the conversation by saying that she didn't love the color, but it served its purpose as a case. "Now, if they had one in pink camouflage..." and I tuned out.

She said that articles need to be in third person, not in first like I wrote it.

With regards to the title change, she changed it from, "Puns and Inferences for $200, Alex," to "The use of puns." I liked my title much better than what she chose, but more than that, she didn't tell me why she changed it (so I'll know for next time), and she didn't ask for any input at all about what she changed it to.

And if she had, I would have said, "I don't like that it just omitted the word inference when the piece is as much about inference as it is about puns. And even more than that, the article is really not about the use of puns, it's about the complexity of language, with puns and inference as an example."

With regards to her comment about writing in the third person, first of all it's confusing to me that she went ahead and published it in the first person instead of saying, "Please re-write this before we publish it."

And second of all, if I'd've known from the beginning that they want the writing in third person, I'd've thought more about signing up. The kind of writing that I want to do is pretty much all about the way I experience things and my opinion about them, which is kind of hard to write without saying, "I."

I'm going to take a stab at another article or two, but this gig may end up being very short, because in addition to the two things I just articulated, the ad of theirs that I responded to was for a "Grammar Examiner" (turning in a sample of what I'd write about—which was in first person, by the way), and when they accepted me, they said, "Welcome. We're pleased to have you as the Raleigh Academic Writing Examiner," which I guess could be considered a superset of a "Grammar Examiner," but still.

With all that said, it was still a fun article to write, and I was glad to have the opportunity to do it.

I got to the gym tonight, where I did 225 (15 sets of 15) ab crunches, followed by 30 minutes on the elliptical machine.

I watched Jeopardy®, during which one person's response that was correct, wasn't accepted, because he tried to be funny in his response by making a comment before his answer and that comment was not in the form of a question. Alex Trebek seemed to revel in that. He so gets on my nerves.

I saw the beginning of Wheel of Fortune®, and I'm still not quite sure why Pat Sajak has to be holding Vanna White's hand/arm while they're approaching the stage at the beginning. But then again, I'm not sure why Vanna's there at all, I mean there is technology available to turn those letters around automagically. Perhaps if it were a smoking hot man turning the letters around I would understand it better.

I was supposed to go out tonight, but made the critical mistake of "lying down for just a few minutes," and that was that. In retrospect, I should've accepted an offer by my friend Julie to grab a bite for dinner and do the first Friday gallery walk with her.